Trump fires CEO of TVA over replacing US tech workers with H1B workers
fox17.com
fox17.com
The administration should be cracking down on H1B violations.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/03/26/h-1b-prison-for-visa-...
No, but he hired contractors who violated rules his ultimate boss, the President, has made a policy priority. As the head of a state-owned corporation, political instincts are part of the requirements.
I mean, how would you crack down on drug dealers?
Let’s suppose ~5% of all H1B’s are problematic... That’s ~9,000 per year so catching 1% of cases would be ~900 over the last decade.
That sounds like a pretty reasonable thing to do, to selectively enforce higher standards on government organizations.
Personally I would love to see an H1B crackdown, but this isn’t it.
> Trump made the announcement as he signed an executive order to require all federal agencies to complete an internal audit to prove they are not replacing qualified American workers with people from other countries. The White House said the order will help prevent federal agencies from unfairly replacing American workers with lower cost foreign labor.
At least that’s my understanding I don’t see the order on here yet: https://www.federalregister.gov/presidential-documents/execu...
“Sec. 2. Review of Contracting and Hiring Practices.” ...
“Within 120 days of the date of this order, the head of each agency shall submit a report to the Director of the Office of Management and Budget summarizing the results of the reviews required by subsections (a) through (c) of this section; recommending, if necessary, corrective actions that may be taken by the agency and timeframes to implement such actions; and proposing any Presidential actions that may be appropriate.”
Of note the election is only 91 days from now. He had just under 4 years to get something done and this is an executive order focused on submitting a report after the election.
The abuse was brought to light (by the non-profit U.S. Tech Workers), and the executive branch executed on that information against a federally chartered corporation's chief executive. Whether it's selective or not is immaterial. Some violators will get away (unfortunately!), some will not. Try complaining to the officer as they write the ticket that everyone else was speeding too. Everyone else was, but you were the one who was pulled over and is getting the ticket.
If you're a CEO of a government owned corporation, it seems like it has become a good idea to go out of your way to either a) hire local workers, or b) make sure you have a paper trail to prove you really needed those contractors for a reason other than cost savings.
Or is the policy different depending on the political winds?
Two very different issues. If the policy is one way for one administration, and different for another, you're still in trouble. In fact, the policy can be one way for an administration, and then an election comes up and that administration needs some political points.
My whole argument is premised on what ought to be. I don't disagree with you on what the case may actually be.
> The executive order, Hira said, appears to provide “a way to ensure that ‘secondary employers’ — outsourcers — adhere to the H-1B attestations as though they are direct employers of the client.”
> Such a change, if enforced, should prevent abuses such as those reported at Southern California Edison and Disney, where workers allegedly had to train their own H-1B replacements, Hira said.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/08/03/h-1b-visa-president-t...
So long as it doesn’t become a revolving door project with workers influenced by private companies by promises of future employment, then I think the whole practice is fine.
So the job of running a $10 billion dollar per year company that manages nuclear power plants, hydroelectric dams, and supplies power to millions of people is done by someone who hasn't yet proven they likely have the capability to do so?
This isn't a summer internship at the State Department.
Trump acknowledged that he was made aware of the issue
after seeing a television ad ... that aired in prime time
on Fox News.
...
The ad, Lynn said, had an “audience of one,” aiming to
persuade Trump to stop the TVA from outsourcing much of
its information technology division.
The neoliberal benefits of H1's make sense, but the context has to be clear.
I think it would also make sense if at least public agencies should be required to employ Americans, because the H1 program is not supposed to be for the purposes of 'saving money' and it's hard to fathom what kind of 'highly specialised expertise' is needed in governmental IT operations. Perhaps on a consultative basis.
If there are legit R&D needs, i.e. if they were designing new chips for NASA or whatever, fair enough ... but most of this is pretty squarely in the domain of 'off the shelf' IT work. Again - even then the benefits are possibly positive 'on the whole' for the economy, if not for the workers who otherwise did not get a job ... but it's public money ... I think it makes sense to hire locally and I don't think for a second Americans would have a problem with that.
Of all the things everyone likes to argue about (i.e. taxes, unemployment benefits) - I suggest there would be at least some easy consensus here.
TVA is a government owned corporation, but it's fully self funded. So they're not spending public money other than insofar as TVA costs get passed to the electric bills of anyone whose local electric utility is purchasing electricity from TVA.
TVA has over 10k active employees and has only ever had 10 H1B employees (all hired between 2001 - 2008)[1]. And all of their H1B hires fell into either electrical engineering or product/financial risk analysis, and all located within Nashville, TN or Chattanooga, TN. Their usage of H1B employees seems far more indicative of localized hiring difficulty, rather than some pattern of H1B abuse. I've lived in both of those places, and they both have risen in popularity and desirability throughout the last decade. Having hired in Nashville before, people have become far more willing to relocate to Tennessee over the last few years. But that doesn't mean their was similar interest in relocating to TN for work 12-19 years ago when they filled these roles with H1B hires.
[1] https://h1bsalary.online/index.php?searchtext=TENNESSEE+VALL...
And my comment was about TVA's direct use of the H1B program - not use of an IT contractor that is likely to be (ab)using the H1B program to staff the roles. That said, the IT contractors TVA is using for their IT outsourcing are used all over the federal government, even if through layers of subcontracting. So it's a bit frustrating that a TV ad triggered such a reactionary response from Trump in this isolated case but not in any other.
https://h1bsalary.online/index.php?searchtext=Tennessee+Vall...
He fired the first poor bastard he found to rile up his base on the idea that he is protecting American jobs. This is not only absolutely stupid and unjustified. It also shows how petty are politics in this country.
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/aroundregion/st...
They should explicitly write rules for this if that's what they want to enforce.
Either way, it seems like a very petty and selectively populist political move. "Look I fired this fucker who wasn't prioritizing American workers".... That dude hardly knew about that. He was looking at the price tag, not the LCAs of their sub-contractors.
I would expect that you would be required to meet federal government labor regulations and standards (including H1B visa requirements), even when using subcontractors, when you are a federally chartered corporation or are doing business with the federal government.
https://www.natlawreview.com/article/guide-to-labor-and-empl... (A Guide to Labor and Employment Obligations for Federal Contractors)
> IX. Subcontracting: Contractors must recognize that their obligations under these laws and executive orders also apply to their subcontractors. Many CBAs provide that the agreement applies to any subcontractor used by the contractor to perform work done by covered employees, and the contractor is responsible for the subcontractor’s failure to comply with the terms of the CBA. (snipped non-relevant union language for brevity, available in link above)
EDIT: @belltaco: You're violating the law if you replace US workers with H1Bs [1] [2]. This is supposedly what TVA contractors have done [3] [4] [5].
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/11/08/h-1b-spouses-h-4-work...
[2] https://www.uscis.gov/report-fraud/combating-fraud-and-abuse...
[3] https://usagag.com/tennessee-valley-authority-firing-america...
[4] https://whnt.com/news/huntsville/protesters-in-huntsville-ra...
The constant pressure toward replacing manufactured goods (food included) with cheaper alternatives isn't just about increasing margins, it's also about sticker shock ratcheting up among your customers.
I don't know about recently, but tech salaries were growing much faster than inflation for a long time. I suspect that in some cases those consultancy negotiators were sitting in meetings with customers who didn't understand why they had to pay 25% more to renew a largely unmodified contract. and/or why the senior people are being replaced. Because you can't afford those people anymore, pal.
So for the same dollar you are probably getting more COTS/OSS software and talent that is easier to exploit (young, H1-B, or both). I hesitate to think what happens in 2030 when whole teams are already the most vulnerable developers and it's time to renegotiate contracts again.
The three worked for state agencies, though. One was the DOT of NYC, if I remember correctly. Still, this is hardly the issue. This is hinting that any government sub-contractor should abstain from hiring H1Bs and there's no written law that prohibits this. Again pure pettiness.
So I don't get your question. I was the one that from the beginning claimed ignorance about the federal policies by bringing up the fact that the people I know worked for state agencies.
In this case, the contractors were breaking the law. It doesn't seem unreasonable for federal agencies to not do business with companies breaking the law.
I'm not taking sides. But the fact is, we can't have change without change. The Grand Canyon started with a drop of water.
I am glad for every move that makes sense that doesn’t undermine the stability of jobs for local workers who pay their fair share of taxes and add vitality to the local economy.
I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying. Did you really mean "benefactors", or perhaps "beneficiaries"?
Any H1B worker also pays their fair share of taxes and adds to the local economy. This word salad you got here is just FUD.
Maybe you just got confused and thought it was about illegal immigrants instead?
They’d be selling out Mexican workers for lower wage workers —which is what happened to the IF group at SFSU. So now they are not working.
This isn’t about saving cobblers jobs or phone assembly jobs, these are skilled jobs that were saying, sorry fellow taxpayers, but we found cheaper!
U.S. Tech Workers, a nonprofit that wants to limit visas given to foreign technology workers, took out an ad to persuade Trump to stop the TVA from outsourcing much of its information technology division. The group, led by Kevin Lynn, criticized the TVA for furloughing its own workers and replacing them with contractors using foreign workers with H-1B visas.
If that assertion is true, then the outcome here (with the CEO being fired) seems very fitting and appropriate. That would amount to a gross misuse of public trust, for a public (US Government) owned organization.
All TVA employees are U.S. based citizens. All jobs related to TVA’s Information Technology department must be performed in the U.S. by individuals who may legally work in this country.
So all _employees_ are citizens. All _jobs_ (hello contractors) are by authorized individuals in the US.
Edit: for the downvoters -- a citation to back up my assertion: https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/president-tru...
Wait, so they were underpaying the H1B workers the way they're explicitly prohibited by law from doing?
Electrical engineering related hires had salaries between $47k - $55k. Looking at other H1B salary data for those years (2001 - 2003)[2], and the TVA salaries seem on par with other H1B hires(they're neither the lowest, nor the highest). Chattanooga where all these hires were at also has a fairly low cost of living, so $55k sounds like a decent wage for the area.
The more recent hires were all managerial level, and range from $90k - $130k. Not sure how competitive those were with domestic hires at the time (last H1B hire was in 2008), but overall they're fairly high salaries. And these were all in Nashville, where that wage is enough to support a family living in the well-to-do suburbs of the area.
[1] https://h1bsalary.online/index.php?searchtext=TENNESSEE+VALL...
[2] https://h1bsalary.online/index.php?searchtext=ELECTRICAL+ENG...
Skills for one. The way H1B was really meant to be used. I am not arguing TVA did this. But there ARE reasons to hire H1B workers other than cost. Case in point Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.
It's supposed to be an essentially merit-based path to immigration, and if true, that would make it exactly the kind of program that Trump should 100% support.
To the extent that H1B accomplishes this objective of highly skilled labor at prevailing market wages, I think it's a useful program that has a place in the overall immigration system.
From a macroeconomic view, even when limited to bringing in skilled labor to fulfill a specific market shortage, this will still depress the prevailing wage in that market, which theoretically prevents the market from correcting when rising wages induce increased local supply.
Fundamentally something is broken with the wage market when real wages have not grown in decades. Partially this is a problem with the measurement not correctly accounting for significantly increased cost of [healthcare] benefits covered by the employer share. But I believe even when accounting for the full employer-side cost of wages, this number has not grown as expected, and low-wage work visas are part of the problem.
Yes, that's a bad thing when the business owner is the United States Federal Government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/us/undocumented-housekeep...
__ edit__ if someone's downvoting, maybe they could come out and indicate if (a) you can't detect sarcasm, (b) you approve of hiring illegals, or (c) you think Trump should be allowed to break the law while grandstanding on an old H1 question?
> Trump acknowledged that he was made aware of the issue after seeing a television ad produced by U.S. Tech Workers, a nonprofit that wants to limit visas given to foreign technology workers, that aired in prime time on Fox News.
It does seem truly scary that by far the easiest way to get the US president to do something is to put an ad on Fox News. If you can package your cause into one of his pet topics, you have a good chance of something getting done. A US president that is so easily manipulated is terrifying.
Seriously, it's irrelevant. When he learned of a federally-controlled entity working against the best interests of Americans, he took action. That's really all that matters. I don't care if he saw a TV ad, a billboard, or any other unconventional means of communication with the US President.